IBM Cognos and Zendesk operate in the realm of business analytics and customer support solutions. Zendesk appears to have a slight edge due to its ease of use and positive feedback concerning customer service and deployment.
Features: IBM Cognos provides a suite of analytical capabilities and robust reporting, supporting both technical and non-technical users. It includes tools for modeling, scheduling, and report distribution. Zendesk offers simplicity in ticket management, agent management, and smooth integration with third-party applications.
Room for Improvement: IBM Cognos users face issues with data visualization, complexity in learning, and limited integration with certain databases. The interface is considered outdated, and improvements in performance are needed. Zendesk needs better ticket merging, enhanced metrics, and streamlined reporting features. Both platforms benefit from improved user interfaces and simpler workflows.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Cognos is mainly on-premises with support for hybrid and private cloud environments, often requiring significant technical expertise. Customer service feedback is mixed. In contrast, Zendesk favors cloud deployments, offering quick setup and receiving positive customer service reviews.
Pricing and ROI: IBM Cognos, a premium solution with a complex pricing structure, is costly but provides ROI through its comprehensive features. Pricing negotiation is recommended. Zendesk, though high on a per-agent basis, reflects its functionality and integration capabilities, emphasizing understanding specific needs to optimize licensing costs.
I rate technical support from IBM as eight out of ten, indicating a high quality of service.
The technical support provided by Zendesk has been very satisfactory.
It can be scaled out to other teams, but requires building cubes and implementing policies.
Zendesk can scale from very small companies to very large ones.
I rate the stability of this solution as nine out of ten, indicating it is highly stable.
The stability has been quite reliable.
There is room for improvement in self-service analytics and predictiveness.
There could be improvements in integration, which can be achieved with APIs or tools like Zapier.
I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions.
It is not the cheapest solution nor the most expensive, but it provides value for money.
IBM Cognos is a robust governed platform with significant security features and provides excellent graphics and reporting.
It allows us to handle more support cases with fewer people due to its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.
IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.
IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:
Reviews from Real Users
IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.
Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”
Zendesk Support is intuitive, and it's built with support agents in mind. Everything they need lives in a single, dynamic help desk interface so it's easy to be productive and manage customer interactions.
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